Top Strategies for Effective Multifamily Lead Nurturing

Multifamily marketing professionals face unique issues with lead nurturing through the marketing funnel.

For the multifamily market, issues arise in the form of heavy competition from neighboring apartments and issues with customer retention. For developers, problems arise with a lack of awareness limiting incoming leads. For vendors, issues arise with qualifying incoming leads to ensure they are legitimate and within the proper target audience.

While many methods help generate leads, the best way to ensure continued success is to nurture your leads. Through lead nurturing, continued strategic contact can help ensure that the leads you generate are properly qualified and remain interested in your offerings.

While lead nurturing is critical to the continued marketing success of any multifamily business, most companies fall woefully behind. According to HubSpot, 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing. This is a huge missed opportunity as organizations that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more multifamily leads at 33% lower cost.

And Annuitus Group suggests that not only do companies who use automation to nurture their leads generate 451% more qualified leads but also that those leads are 47% more likely to make a larger purchase than their non-nurtured counterparts.

Knowing these numbers about lead nurturing, how many multifamily marketers miss it?

Valuing a Digital Multifamily Marketing Strategy

The commercial real estate industry is known for being behind the curve in adapting to the latest trends — especially technology. The same is true for marketing techniques.

Groups with no expertise in the industry have no idea how to use digital marketing to meet their marketing needs strategically. Partner this with a hesitancy to leave behind expensive “tried-and-true” outbound methods, and it becomes clear that commercial real estate marketers are unsure how to invest in digital multifamily marketing.

The key to robust digital marketing is to attribute value to that strategy. Many commercial real estate marketers fail to do so, hurting them in the long run. 

The Advantages of Lead Nurturing

• Sustain Engagement: Keep your prospects engaged and maintain top-of-mind awareness for when they are ready to purchase.
• Guide Toward Sales: Nurture your contacts by seamlessly integrating sales messages within informative and valuable thought leadership content.
• Enhance Conversion Rates: Boost the likelihood of converting leads into sales by adopting a nurturing approach that adds value, ultimately maximizing the return on investment (ROI) for acquiring contact data.
• Prevent Lead Fatigue: Reduce the risk of overwhelming leads with aggressive sales pitches immediately after they download one of your resources. People generally prefer an educational and nurturing approach, which contributes to the success of building relationships and driving conversions.

Finding a Balance

Digital marketing relies on the perfect balance of digital strategies, working together in an integrated manner to ensure consistent messaging and continued contact with an apartment lead or prospect. This means unique content — such as blogging, offers, social media content, email marketing, etc. — should all be tied around a central persona, strategy, and buyer’s journey.

Adding these aspects together and ensuring you have the team and resources to run it all adds up. However, compared to the average standard spend on outbound strategies, the cost is typically much less. In fact, inbound multifamily marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, yet each dollar spent on inbound marketing generates 3x as many apartment leads.

7 Types of Email Marketing Campaigns for Multifamily Lead Nurturing

Typically, when speaking of apartment lead nurturing, people instantly think of email drip campaigns. These are email campaigns automated to go out to a list over a specific period. While this can be a lead nurturing method, it is not the only method.

The fact of the matter is that many types of lead nurturing emails may be used depending on your needs. And each has a benefit or strength.

1. Welcome and Engagement Nurturing

When bringing new leads aboard, it’s wise to nurture them while they are still hot — actively interested. Capitalizing on the novelty of your introduction to them can be a great foot in the door to a positive impression. However, it’s also important not to scare away your multifamily leads by coming off as overeager. This is where a “welcome” campaign comes into place.

The benefit is two-fold: While engaging your lead with your brand, you can use this campaign to gather information to segment the lead further. Step one of a welcome campaign is always the same — you take the time to welcome your new multifamily lead and let them know what to expect. You can also offer a free resource.

Going an extra step, you can offer these leads a way to get customized information depending on their interests. This may take much work on your backend through list segmentation and automation software. But if the framework is there, it’s work that pays off. Offer a weekly newsletter on multifamily trends, interesting statistics, or relevant industry articles.

Engagement campaigns are similar and can often stem as an off-shoot of your welcome campaign. Want feedback on a certain aspect of your business? Engage a list focused on that aspect of a focus group or survey session, and motivate them to participate. In this form of nurturing, your imagination is the limit.

2. Qualification Campaigns

A qualification campaign allows you to hone in on a lead in a critical interest time. Let’s say a multifamily lead downloads a few offers in quick succession. Adding this lead to a qualification campaign lets you speak to them clearly as they try to discover the answer to their problem. Sending more related offers with opportunities to touch base with your team brings you closer to making the lead sales qualified.

3. Traditional Nurturing Campaigns

A traditional nurturing campaign takes your lead’s interest and continues to offer relevant educational material. These types of campaigns most often accompany your overall marketing strategy. This campaign includes keeping in touch with a multifamily lead, giving them small opportunities to convert.

4. Event Campaigns

Whether hosting an event online or in person, an event campaign can help pique interest and attendance. Even if you’re trying to boost attendance to your booth at an industry conference, event campaigns are a great way to spread awareness, boost interest (usually by a unique offer), offer reminders and other great tips leading to your event, and provide an excuse for strong feedback and thank you emails that can further promote conversion.

5. Promotional Campaigns

If you have some multifamily leads you feel are on the edge of closing, a promotional campaign might be a nudge in the right direction. A promotional campaign should be very controlled, not to cheapen the perceived value of your product. Discounts, free bonuses, or even referral bonuses are good ways to augment a promotional campaign.

6. Re-engagement Campaign

Do you have a lot of leads that have gone cold? Purging these leads from your lists can seem like a waste. Instead of letting these multifamily leads go, why not implement a re-engagement campaign? This includes reminding them of your value or offering them something special to engage.

7. Upsell Campaign

Don’t let the title concern you. While upsell campaigns have a negative connotation, they don’t always have to mean or reflect upselling. Rather, an upsell campaign promotes your offerings to existing customers. In some cases, this means offering additional services.

Return Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Knowing that multifamily lead nurturing is far more complex than most marketers realize, the question becomes, which form offers the best return? The answer is not so simple. While each of these nurture campaigns requires a certain amount of upfront investment, the payoff depends entirely on your business.

The question comes down to which problem you are facing the most. If your issue is moving leads down the pipeline, a qualification campaign will most benefit your needs. If you are working on reviving multifamily leads, engagement, and re-engagement campaigns should be your go-to.  

Choosing a nurture campaign tied to your strategy is more important than taking a set-it-and-forget-it route. This is where you can make the most significant impact on your business. Only then will you see sustainable success in nurturing your multifamily leads.

Most apartment marketing professionals have a complicated relationship with email marketing. Receivers are continually overwhelmed by their overflowing inbox while senders are frustrated by the lack of responses. Truth be told, it is hard to avoid the spam folder these days.

That said, email marketing is still the most effective way to reach and nurture apartment leads. 

According to Marketing Sherpa, email is the preferred source of business communication for 72% of consumers. Whether you are nurturing apartment leads through promotions, interests, or top-of-the-mind contact, email is the way to go.

So, how can you make sure you send a really stellar email? What is the secret to getting your email opened, and — more importantly — read?

As you develop a lead nurturing strategy, there are key components to remember:

1. Define the goals of your apartment marketing outreach.

Who is your target audience? Why are you reaching out to them? The goal here should be to send clear and well-defined messages to a specific audience. Figuring out who they are and where their interests lie is the key to understanding which type of nurturing strategy to implement.

Additionally, it is just as important to define the reason for your outreach. Are you looking to generate some foot traffic and tours at your property with leasing specials? Or, perhaps you are seeking new residents who have toured but have not committed yet. 

These scenarios entail two different kinds of apartment leads and each requires its own form of nurturing. The commonality is the overall approach. You want to send targeted offers and content-specific emails to engage on a personal level.

2. Make your email marketing personal.

Sending frequent automated emails can irritate your recipients. Not to mention you will find yourself in the spam folder faster than you hit send. Adding personal touches to your emails guarantees a higher success rate. 

According to Experian, brands that personalize their email subject lines experience 27% higher unique click rates and 11% higher click-to-open rates.

Implementing a practice as simple as using your apartment lead’s name in the greeting makes a big difference. By tailoring your emails to a prospect’s interests, actions, and behaviors, you are sending recipients something that they will want to read. 

This is especially important in the commercial real estate or multifamily space. Personalized apartment marketing allows you to keep returning clients in the loop while simultaneously reaching out to new prospects.

3. Send emails with valuable apartment marketing content.

One surefire way to pique a lead’s interest is to saturate your emails with information that they want to know. Send content that is relevant and valuable to your apartment leads. For example, share helpful apartment hacks or storage tips with prospects and share fun events and leasing specials with your prospects.

Focus on your lead’s problem point and position your property as the solution. The key to providing educational content is to focus on one topic per email. This gives your recipients a specific course of action to follow. Multifamily properties, for example, can use this nurturing strategy by sending emails that educate prospects on the neighborhood or highlight unique amenities.

4. Connect with your apartment leads on multiple platforms.

Engaging with residents on various types of media keeps you actively present and part of their daily lives. Connecting beyond the initial email exchange is a great way to keep in touch and achieve top-of-mind awareness. 

Some digital ways to engage with apartment leads include: 

• Invite them to subscribe to your blog
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Share links to your company’s social media pages
• Encourage prospects to share your email or social media content

Engage Your Apartment Leads to Grow Your Property

Getting the lead is important. But it is what you do with your apartment leads that really counts. Nurturing your prospect through email marketing is the best way to connect with a lead and turn it into a lease. Integrating these tips into your apartment marketing strategy will further engage your apartment leads and grow your property.

In the world of digital marketing, it can be hard to know which tactic works best. These days, a lot of businesses mistakenly focus too much of their digital marketing efforts on one specific tactic like blogging or social media.

However, each part of your digital marketing strategy should fit together as one cohesive piece. Your website, social media presence, user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), etc. should all work together to create a successful inbound marketing plan.

Bring Them to You

Digital marketing and specifically inbound marketing is all about the consumer. However, it’s not about bombarding them with interruptive advertisements. It’s about providing relevant and helpful information to your customers. The internet has truly changed the flow of advertising because consumers are now able to research a product before making a purchase.

As a marketing professional, it’s important to think of yourself more as a resource than a salesperson. People will want to come to you if you’re providing the right kind of information. When people see you as an asset, they’ll feel a sense of trust.

Research Your Audience

The first thing you need to do to serve as this resource to your consumer is to identify your audience. A multifamily property in downtown Dallas may know that a typical resident is a young professional between the ages of 23 and 30, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Using market research, you can analyze who your target market is beyond the typical demographics, and begin to understand their needs, their pain points, and where they might seek out information.

A combination of market research and customer interviews can help you create buyer personas. Per HubSpot, a buyer persona is the creation of a semi-fictional profile. The persona profile should include a narrative of day-to-day interactions, demographic behavior, goals, pain points, what his/her search process has been, the type of experience desired, common objections, and a photo of your persona.

Most businesses have multiple buyer personas to understand the full scope of the audience that uses their product or service. Having a unique profile for each persona is important. Your buyer personas should inform everything you do and are integral to your digital marketing strategy.

The Perfect Content

Once you have a persona, the next step is attracting people through content creation. According to HubSpot, businesses should focus on “creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.”

Now here’s the caveat: According to SingleGrain, you should be spending about 80% of your time promoting your content and 20% of your time creating it. Think about it, If you have the world’s best content but people aren’t seeing it, what’s the point? It’s like the old adage about a tree falling in the forest when no one’s around to hear it — did it really fall? While creating relevant content is incredibly important, it’s the promotion of that content that is imperative.

Now, this is where the other elements of your digital marketing strategy can come into play. Each of these tactics should work together to build a well-rounded digital marketing campaign. These tactics are more effective in working together because the inbound methodology builds on each tactic to create a strategy.

Digital Marketing Elements: Email, Web, Social Media

Email marketing, for example, is considered to be one of the strongest tactics for nurturing leads. Integrating a strong email campaign into your digital marketing strategy is an important part of converting leads to leases. However, it’s most effective when pushing out sharable content that will lead customers down a purchase path.

Email marketing is also a great tool for tracking your target market so you can inform your content strategy. Based on the number of email opens and the clickthrough rate, you can see what kind of material your prospects are interested in.

This is also the case on your website. Automation allows you to track what your website visitors are doing on your site. Using this newly gathered information, you can help move leads along in a more personalized and effective way.

Knowing the content your audience is interested in is also helpful in social media as you’re able to show them what they want to see. Your user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) also tie into this notion. The better the experience your potential clients have, the more interest they will have in moving forward with you. The same works for existing clients. About 83% of customers who experience positive interactions with brands are willing to offer referrals.

The integration of all aspects of the inbound methodology will differentiate you from the competition. You need more than a few social media pages or an automated email campaign to be successful. A full digital marketing strategy includes these elements and builds on them as a part of a comprehensive plan. It’s the combination of these strategies that will truly make your digital marketing strategy successful.